... have you switched to Mavericks? If so, have you found that your machine grinds to a halt sometimes, or runs out of memory way to easily? This has happened to me on both my older MacBook Pro and on my newer MacBook Air. It is quite frustrating at times. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Steve Z.

I've had Mavericks on my MacBook Air (mid-2012 13") since the first commercial release, and am currently at 10.9.3. The machine has 8 GB memory and a 500 GB SSD. (Since I knew I would use this machine for 8-10 hours a day, I wanted it fully tricked out. It was a good strategy, I haven't regretting the initial expense.)

I rarely have slowdowns and when I do it is always a run-away application process and not the OS. (E.g., a few months ago a bad release of Crash Plan would go insane and use all memory, requiring a process force-quit.) I do have two recurring OS issues:

The first recurring OS issue is sleep. The machine will freeze on awakening from sleep about 3% of the time -- i.e., about once a month. I cannot say for sure that it is a Mavericks issue, but I did have the problem with 10.8 -- which of course is an inadequate sample.

The second is permissions and/or directory corruption. I boot into the recovery HD partition every two weeks to run Disk Utility from there and repair permissions and the disk. About every six weeks there is corruption in the directory that needs to be fixed, as well as the usual mysterious OS X permissions issues that seem to plague every release. No doubt these are both related to the first issue -- bad recovery from sleep causing directory corruption.

I have never lost data or more than 20 minutes work from any of these errors.

"I did have the problem with 10.8" should be "I did NOT have the problem with 10.8"

Steve,

I haven't so far had problems directly attributable to Mavericks itself. In my desktop I do have - as I say in another thread - 16GB of RAM: I believe that the spec for my Mac Mini sets 8 GB as a maximum, but I've found that in order to run Parallels and one or two particular Windows programmes I need 16GB, which the Mac Mini is able to use without trouble.

I have found that, first, Mavericks plus various Mac programmes can easily consume 6 GB, probably 2 GB more than under Mountain Lion - the consumption has progressively increased from 10.9.1 to 10.9.3 - and second that one or two individual Mac programmes when running under Mavericks can start eating up RAM when they didn't do so previously - even though the versions I have have been upgraded for Mavericks. (I woke my Mac yesterday to find that 12GB of RAM were in use, but I think I know what the 'culprit' programme was.)

I'm hoping that, as happened with previous upgrades, these issues will soon settle down.

Incidentally, I've found it quite useful to keep a 'memory-meter' app in my menu bar, which I employ both to keep an eye on how much memory I have in play, and to optimise it on occasion. I know there's debate about how effective these applications are; all I'll say is that mine works for me.

Thanks, Paul and Hugh. For my older MacBook Pro, I think the problem is a bad hard drive. I tried running the Disk Utility under the recovery partition you described, Paul, and it basically told me, BACK UP YOUR FILES AND RUN FOR THE HILLS! For the MacBook Air, I may need to upgrade the RAM, as it only came with 4 GB. I was under the impression that Mavericks was supposed to do a better job of managing memory resources. So much for that.

Thanks again!

Steve Z.

Ugh, last year all four drives in my MacPro died within a few days. Since they were all born at the same time it was interesting that their lives we so closely related. If you have to replace a drive, consider a SSD. A benefit of a large SSD is that memory paging is nearly as fast as core memory. I run a OS X and Windows 8.1 concurrently along with a ridiculous number of concurrent programs and menu bar apps (35 in the menu bar right now) and have never experienced slow performance. According to tech blogger opinion, this is supposed to be "a bad thing", but is not.

The trick is the SSD.

I have been experiencing a strange behavior with my Mac Book Pro in the last 2 weeks. It is brand new and has 16gb of memory and 1tb SSD disk. Sometimes, when I switch it on, it takes almost 12 minutes to boot, i.e., for the the login prompt appear. Last week it happened twice. Saturday morning was the last time. After the upgrade of Maverick this weekend, it didn't happen again. Does anyone have the same experience or have an explanation?

Mauro
I have a 2010 or 2011 (I forget) MBP with a 512MB SSD and never experienced the problem you are describing. But then again, I almost never reboot it, just put it to sleep normally. But even when I reboot for the security updates this usually never takes longer than a minute or so even with encryption on.

Does you running a Macbook mean that future versions of ConnectedText will be more Mac-friendly or even running natively on a Mac? This would be just awesome.

Prion

As a follow up: I am getting a new hard drive for my 3-plus-year-old MacBook Pro, and upgrading to 8 gigs of RAM from 4 gigs. I've opted to keep Mavericks running on it, hoping the more robust RAM will improve performance.

I decided to rollback my newer MacBook Air 11" to Mountain Lion, after I installed a memory meter and saw that I was constantly running on RED amounts of memory. After the rollback, I consistently have over a gig of free memory (that is, the computer has over a gig... me, I'm not so sure). Also, the Air was frequently running hot under Mavericks. It seems much happier under Mount Lion... Anyway, "Mavericks" makes me think of the McCain/Palin ticket and that makes me shudder.

Steve Z.